Last month, Wolfire Games, an independent game developer and distributor, unleashed a pay-what-you-want campaign for a bundle of indie games that seemed to take a play from the famous Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment. The Humble Indie Bundle, as it was called, was offered from May 4 through May 11, and generated over $1.2 million in revenue for the game developers who participated, as well as two charities.

The bundle initially consisted of five indie games: World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games ). Later, Amanita Design kicked in a sixth game, Samorost 2. All the  games run on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

People could literally pay anything they wanted for the Humble Indie Bundle, starting at $.01. The largest single donation rang in at $3,333.33. I personally paid $10.01. You could choose to allot part or all of the price to the two charities, Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). While you could have bought the games or donated to the charities separately, the combination of the two made the bundle appealing. You can’t deny the power of one -stop shopping.

John Graham, Chief Operating Officer of Wolfire Games, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the Humble Indie Bundle campaign in a post-promotion debriefing.

How did the idea for the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle come about?
Ever since the success of 2DBoy’s pay-what-you-want experiment and our Organic Indie Preorder Pack [a game bundle of Wolfire’s Overgrowth and the Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection 2], we had this feeling that independent developers could really do a lot to promote themselves.
How did you decide what games to put in the bundle?

Our main requirement for this bundle was that we needed awesome indie games available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.  We didn’t have a fancy rubric, and weren’t maximizing any kind of bundle hotness equation, but I think it’s fair to say that we ended up with a group of games that are all different but very awesome.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? Did you learn anything from the Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment?

Well, our theory was that a pay-what-you-want bundle would maximize participation and also allow people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, and I think this proved true.  With pirated copies already easily available for all the games, we figured our biggest risk was not piracy but rather that we would spend a lot of time on this promotion, and then no one would hear about it. Read more…

It’s hard not to notice social games. Every time I log into Facebook, I am flooded with requests to play games with friends. Given that I’ve had an aquarium on and off since I was three, the allure of a virtual Facebook fish tank finally became too much: FishVille was going to be my game of choice. (Apparently, I’m not alone, as the game has more than 23 million monthly players.)

Like other social games, FishVille, developed by Zynga, leverages your social network for gameplay. Your friends help you obtain items and take care of your fish, and you help them in return. In that way, social games are more collaborative than other game genres. Social games are also built around the idea of playing regularly. Just like you feel compelled to check Facebook, you feel compelled to check on your fish tank or your farm. I decided to play FishVille for 17 days to see if it could keep my interest for the duration.

Read more…

For years, Nintendo has ruled the mobile gaming world, first with the Game Boy, then with the DS Lite. After an amazing run, though, the torch is being passed. Not to another gaming company, but to smart phone makers Google and Apple.

Over the next decade I believe smart phones will be where most gaming innovation will happen. The market for smart phone games is booming. A recent New York Times article reported that games make up more than half of the billion downloads from the Apple App Store. The App Store has about 15,000 games for the iPhone, and the Android Market has about 3,000 for Google Android devices.

Read more…

For years, video games were strangely absent from the social media tidal wave. Aside from casual games built into social networking websites, games didn’t support social media.

The recently released (Oct. 13) “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” for the PlayStation 3, hopes to change that with a built-in Twitter feature. The game uses Twitter in a fairly simple way, by sending updates on a player’s progress to his or her Twitter account.

Twitter is also at the heart of a social media update to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that went live today. It allows you to post tweets, read the tweets of those you follow, search and view trending topics. Along with a Twitter app, the Xbox 360 update also has a Facebook app to stay connected to friends through basic Facebook features.

These instances of Twitter in video games—one software and one hardware—still only scratch the surface of the potential to meld social media and gaming. The use of Twitter in “Uncharted 2” seems like a good way to market the game and to find other people who play the game, but beyond that it doesn’t do much. And the Twitter integration on the Xbox 360 isn’t very deep, as you can’t run the app while you are playing a game.

The real issue here isn’t how Twitter is integrated into games or hardware platforms, but how the gameplay can take advantage of social media’s best assets—connecting people and sharing information.

Read more…

On Sept. 9, the Beatles finally entered the world of digital music. This was an inevitable move, but what’s truly interesting is how they chose to do it. Well-known Beatles fan Steve Jobs has yet to secure the world-famous music catalog in a digital format for iTunes. So who did? MTV/Viacom and their video game studio Harmonix, which created “Rock Band: The Beatles” for video game consoles.

Money is said to be one of the sticking points in the negotiations to bring the Beatles’ catalog to iTunes. I have no doubt that money influenced the Beatles’ decision to do a video game, but I’d also bet that they wanted to do something different and cutting-edge. Read more…

If there is one thing that’s been part of video game culture since the beginning, it’s the debate among gamers over which platform is superior. Slinging insults at each other’s machines was easy with such a large arsenal of differences – graphical performance, exclusive titles and modding ability, to name a few. If you were a fourth grader at Pacific Drive Elementary in Fullerton, Calif., in 1993, you no doubt faced my position that the Sega Genesis was clearly the better platform because of how “cool” it was that you could turn blood on and off with the secret ABACABB code in “Mortal Kombat.” As fun as those debates were, I think the days of arguing about which platform is better will soon be over, as cross-platform gaming makes platforms less important.

Read more…

I sometimes have the troubling thought of “what’s the point?” Yes, I am referring to social media and/or social networking and not the question of whether to put on clothes each morning.

While questioning something that I study on a daily basis might be a pointless task, I would like to think it helps me to analyze it and understand it. This question is mainly ignited by other people who say “what’s the point of blogging?” Or, “what’s the point of Twitter? Aren’t people just stroking their egos with it by thinking that people actually care what you have to say?”

I have to agree with the naysayers sometimes. Sometimes, I really don’t get how some social media is anything more than the expectation that people actually care what I have to say. And other times… it makes complete and total sense to me. Are the times it makes sense when I think what I have to say is important? I don’t know.

Am I the only one who ever questions this? If you would like to point out the irony of this post in the comments, I encourage you to do so.

Today, the Criterion Collection launched a new feature, Online Cinematheque, that allows users to view films for $5 before they buy them.

The Criterion Collection is a home video distribution company that specializes in bringing seminal (and often difficult to obtain) films into personal collections. What makes Criterion releases unique and special is the quality of the release. Every film given the Criterion treatment turns out to be a beautiful product, from the packaging, art direction, menu design, film transfer, audio tracks to searching for lost and forgotten deleted scenes or interviews with the director. This quality product comes at a price, and that price is often double that of a standard edition DVD.

Because Criterion Collection films are often rare art house films, the ability to watch films online for $5 before deciding to lay down a decent amount of money on a movie you have never seen is a good idea. If you decide to buy the movie from the Criterion website, the $5 will be credited towards the cost of the DVD or Blu-ray.

It is refreshing to see the Criterion Collection exploring new distribution methods for important films and I hope other music and film companies follow their lead.